If you're worried about social justice/equity, I have great news for you: the SFUSD "joke" created dramatic and positive improvements across student demographics, including (and especially) black and Latino students.
In most districts, private school is often better than public school. This is especially true in California for a variety of reasons (first and foremost Prop 13). You may wish to send your kids to private school (makes sense to me) but from the data I've seen, these changes significantly improved SFUSD's math offerings.
Thanks for your reply, and for the links. I followed them and read through them, but I did it quickly, I'll take another look later.
I don't think the data supports the change as an unqualified success. The article you posted (again, I quick read it) doesn't compare calculus enrollment before and after the change. This article from the chronicle provides that data:
"While more students are taking precalculus now, the enrollment in Advanced Placement calculus courses has declined by nearly 13 percent over the past two years. Enrollment in AP Statistics, which requires only Algebra II as a prerequisite, has surged nearly 50 percent."
My understanding is that all courses other than calc that require algebra have seen higher retention and enrollment. So we could view this as a qualified success, a trade-off: better results pre-calc, at the cost of fewer students taking calc. Keep in mind, we don't know how many of the students who are now succeeding in Stats would have been succeeding in Calc, were it not for the change. We are also only given percentage increases/decreases. Without starting populations, we actually don't know if the increase in Stats offsets the decrease in Calc.
Unfortunately, this is precisely the trade-off people were worried about. Fewer of the top students are taking calc. Any claim of success must address this.
FWIW, I do agree with that last bit from the article, about calc in high school not being quite as essential as (some) people think. If an entering college student has very strong algebra, trig, and pre-calc (let's say the ability to solve elaborate algebraic equations involving trig functions, logs, various exponentials, tricky multivariable quotients... and really gets it), then I don't think the lack of formal calc would be all that big a problem.
Then again, calc is a good way to get into those kinds of equations.
I wouldn't call this change an unqualified success either. There are probably ways to improve from this new status quo. Maybe a 13 percent decline in calc enrollment is a sign of overcorrection.
I would call it an improvement, though. That's all I'm on about. Basically what you said about "calc in high school not being quite as essential as (some) people think", together with a dash of "everyone thinks their kid is a genius who's being held back by this change but most of them are wrong" and a heavy dash of "stats is obv better than calc anyway".
calc enrollment goes down by 13%; alg re-dos go down by 30%; seems like most people are winning or breaking even right?
I disagree that “a heavy dash of stats is obv better than calc”. Not saying there’s no case for it, but it isn’t obvious at all.
I also don’t think the line about everyone thinking their kid is a genius is productive for this discussion. I think there’s a reasonable point in there, but I think it’s needlessly caustic and fails to recognize legitimate concerns about the effect this will have on aspiring STEM students in college.
> Enrollment in AP Statistics, which requires only Algebra II as a prerequisite, has surged nearly 50 percent."
Probably has a lot to do with the intro-to-stats stuff that they introduced to the math curriculum as part of this reshuffling. Hard to see that as a negative - if the one thing we can worry about is "more students taking AP stats, fewer taking calculus", I'd say that this change was a huge success!
I took algebra in sixth grade, and I'd learned the material in fourth from mother. Holding until 9th grade is baffling.